Randy Roecker had just finished building a new state-of-the-art dairy barn on his family farm when the Great Recession hit.
The facility was part of his efforts to expand the farm in Loganville, Wisconsin, started by his grandfather in the 1930s with 20 to 30 cows. Roecker watched as the operation grew to 50 cows by the time he graduated high school in 1982, and the dairy barn was part of his plan to usher in the next generation of farmers after him.
By the time Roecker’s new barn was finished in 2006, he was milking 300 cows.
Then came the recession.
“It was just a mess,” Roecker said. “Here I am stuck with this multimillion-dollar project, and the whole economy collapsed.”
The economic downturn threw Roecker into a depression, as he worried whether the farm that had persevered through the Great Depression and the farm crisis of the 1980s would survive. He tried medication and therapy, though they provided little relief.
“When this happened to me, I felt I let everyone down,” Roecker said. “The biggest thing is I was losing my grandfather’s farm that he started in the 1930s. You can’t shake that thought. It just sits with you all the time.”
But for Roecker, the crushing stress didn’t only center around his fear that the 70-year-old operation might end with him. He had also been selected by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns in 2006 for a position on the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board, elevating his involvement with fellow dairy farmers.
“I’m this person who’s well-known in the dairy industry, and I’m on the verge of losing my farm,” Roecker said.
While growing in recognition on the national front, he was also concerned that in his town of 300 people, his neighbors were whispering about him. Roecker’s concerns about what his community knew and thought weighed heavily on him. He recalled sitting in the parking lot of the grocery store and having panic attacks.
“I thought everyone was talking about me wherever I went, that I was a failure,” he recalled.
Roecker’s depression came into focus in 2018, when his neighbor Leon Statz killed himself. He had known Statz’s wife, Brenda, for decades, having dated her when the two were in high school, and Statz’s suicide hit Roecker “like a rock.”
The tragedy prompted Roecker’s church to host meetings with farmers to discuss stress and suicide awareness. Today, the gatherings usually bring between 40 and 50 attendees, with some traveling from neighboring counties to participate as the agriculture industry bears the brunt of President Trump’s trade war with China.
Roecker’s experience is indicative of a broader trend among American farmers. The suicide rate in rural areas is 45% higher than in cities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The issues facing farmers, in particular, are unique, sometimes leaving the broader mental health community ill-equipped to meet their needs.
“A lot of it has to do with the fact that farming is an occupation where nearly every factor contributing to your success and failure is out of your control,” Jennifer Fahy, communications director of Farm Aid, said. “That’s the weather, pests and disease, trade policy, commodity prices and embargoes, all those things that impact the price.”
From 2017 to 2018, Farm Aid, which was founded by singer Willie Nelson in 1985, saw a 109% increase in calls to its crisis hotline, though not all of them were related to mental health. Last year, 56% of calls were for crisis assistance, while just 13% were for resources for beginning farmers.
Fahy worries that the protracted trade war with China, which has effectively closed off the Chinese market to American farmers, and changes in weather and waivers the Trump administration granted to the oil industry exempting them from blending ethanol into gas, have pushed farmers to a brink not seen since the 1980s.
More farmers are taking out operating loans, and farm bankruptcy filings increased 13% from June 2018 to June 2019, according to the American Farm Bureau.
“Certainly people have their identities centered in their occupation, but farmers in particular really have that identity of farming,” Fahy said. “It isn’t just their job; it’s their life. Considering a job or life outside of farming is not something they can even visualize.”
It’s a struggle Roecker knows well.
His mother and father, who are in their 80s and continue to rise before dawn to begin work on the family farm, bought the house Roecker lives in nearly 50 years ago. It’s been his home ever since.
“If you lose the farm, you lose your generational home,” he said. “Over 100 years, families have lived in these same houses.”
But policymakers today are paying more attention to the mental health struggles of farmers than they did in the 1980s, when land values plummeted and farm debt skyrocketed.
The 2018 Farm Bill reauthorized the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, created in 2008, and allocated it $10 million yearly from 2019 to 2023.
Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced legislation last month aimed at curbing the rate of suicides among farmers. The measure, called the Seeding Rural Resilience Act, implements a voluntary stress management training program for agencies that work with farmers and ranchers. It allocates $3 million to the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services for a public service announcement campaign. It calls for the agriculture secretary to work with stakeholders across all levels of government to come up with best practices for farm and ranch mental stress.
“Living through the low prices and massive foreclosures we had on farms in the 1980s, I wasn’t prepared for it,” Grassley said. “The most important thing is to get ahead of the curve instead of in the 1980s, when we were behind the curve.”
Grassley and Tester’s bill ensures the agencies within the Department of Agriculture that interact with farmers have the training to identify when farmers may be suffering from depression and know how to respond. Today, many people who work with farmers, from lenders to attorneys and veterinarians, are taught to recognize signs of suicide or depression.
“Others are stepping up to the plate,” said Mike Rosmann, a clinical psychologist and Iowa farmer. “There is a concerted effort to respond.”
The topic of farmer stress has also become a staple of agriculture forums and conferences and is frequently discussed in farm magazines.
“We’re starting to think about behavioral health as something we need to attend to,” Rosmann said. “It’s one of the few factors that’s under our control as humans.”
Rosmann said he saw a spike in the number of farmers and ranchers contacting him for help via phone and email after a 2017 article in the Guardian called attention to the high suicide rate for farmers.
While Rosmann said he has in recent months seen a drop in the frequency of calls and emails, hotlines set up for farmers in crisis have seen an uptick.
“The conditions that are fostering the farm economic recession have not really diminished in spite of the supplemental payments that were made through presidential declaration,” he said, referencing $28 billion in aid the Department of Agriculture provided to farmers who were collateral damage to the trade war.
In addition to more resources at the federal and state level, a cultural shift has destigmatized the issue of mental illness among farmers.
Grassley remembers that as he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, the words “crazy” and “going off the deep end” were often used to describe people facing depression or thoughts of suicide. He recalled hearing talk of someone having to go to Independence, where the mental health institute is located.
“It just gradually has gone away where today, there’s been movements to do away with the term mental health and substitute for brain disease,” he said.
Interactions between farmers are different today too, Rosmann said.
“It’s OK now for men to greet each other and put an arm around each other. Forty years ago, if you put an arm around another man, you would get funny looks,” he said. “All that has changed. It’s OK now for men to cry, whereas, in the past, it was looked down as a sign of weakness. It’s a good shift that is a protective force.”
Raising awareness among farmers was part of Roecker’s motivation for speaking about his depression.
“You need to talk about this. Don’t hide it anymore,” Roecker said. “We need to shut this stigma.”
